Deadly Rift between Dems and Israel

Deadly Rift between Dems and Israel

by Ilana Mercer

“A toxic rift opens between Democrats and Israel,” blared a Washington Post headline. This, “after the nation refused entry to two members of Congress.” The two members are representatives Rashida Tlaib, Democrat from Michigan, and Ilhan Omar, Democrat from Minnesota.

And the “rift” is toxic only to Democrats—and to the many neoconservatives and establishment Republicans who’ve aligned with them against Israeli nationalists and Trump nationalists.

Properly distilled, the divide is between hardline nationalists (Israeli and American) and the globalists (Democrat and Republicans). Liberal pro-Israel groups were likewise exposed for their disdain for any Israeli display of sovereignty.

But apparently, there are only a vanishingly small number of committed sovereigntists in D.C., hence the divide over the rights of an ostensibly sovereign country.

The excursion was a show and a sham staged by Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber against Israel, to be carried out on Israel’s turf. Tlaib and Omar intended to agitate against the Jewish State. Why would the Israeli government be obligated to facilitate their agitprop-packed itinerary, which would have involved promoting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel?

Like a lot of good blowups, this one began with President Trump. POTUS asked that Israel not let the two frightful members of Congress into the Jewish State. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu obliged.

But then, Israel’s interior minister, Aryeh Deri, delivered the one-two punch to Tlaib. As a humanitarian gesture of goodwill, Deri approved the Palestinian-American’s request to visit her grandmother, aged 90, in the West Bank.

For that maneuver, the mulish Tlaib was unprepared. For a visit with grandma would be nothing without the ability to incite against her hosts. Quickly and capriciously did Ms. quicksilver decide that, no-no, she won’t go:

“Silencing me and treating me like a criminal is not what [granny] wants for me. It would kill a piece of me. I have decided that visiting my grandmother under these oppressive conditions stands against everything I believe in–fighting against racism, oppression and injustice.”

“Apparently, her hate for Israel [overrides] her love for her grandmother,” concluded Deri. Clearly, Tlaib’s plaintive plea was so much provocation, aimed at bashing the State of Israel.

The minister, at once, had enforced Israel’s national interests, while exposing the deeply silly and conniving Rashida Tlaib for the total tembel she is (tembel means “stupid person” or “fool” in Hebrew). Would that U.S. politicians were intuitively as quick to act patriotically, instead of constantly dignifying the left’s demagoguery.

Telling, too, were the justifications used by the likes of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrat from Florida; Joe Lieberman, former senator and bosom buddy of John McCain; AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and legions of politicians and professional pointy-heads, Republican and Democrat, who all abjured Israel for denying travel visas to the two American agitators.

Our support for Israel, explained these and other bad actors like them, rests on Israel reflecting and mimicking “our American freedoms.” So said Wasserman Schultz, who sided with the two Muslim-American Democrats.

In America, everyone is welcome to speak his mind, puled Schultz (even if that “mind” evinces no discernable brainwave activity). Just as Americans welcome any and all into their country (especially haters—how we love those), so, too, must Israel.

The values of Israel are our own, riffed others. In its actions—by deciding not to allow Tlaib and Omar to hold court in Israel—the Israeli government was acting in an un-American fashion. At least, so “reasoned” the commentariat, as they discussed imposing American values on a sovereign country, without that country’s democratic consent.

CNN’s empaneled females fulminated over Israel being a threat to democracy worldwide. Israel was emblematic of the right-wing, fundamentalist global surge, screeched one harridan. Amen—the more nation-states join American and European populism, the better.

Bernie Sanders, however, is correct in fingering the problematic nature of foreign aid to Israel—and to any country, for that matter. In fact, conservatives once had choice words for foreign aid. It was “money down a rathole” (Jesse Helms), and it amounted to “putting Ghana over Grandma” (Tom DeLay).

Said Sanders: “If Israel doesn’t want members of the United States Congress to visit their country. Maybe they can respectfully decline the billions of dollars that we give to Israel.”

He who pays the piper calls the tune. For foreign aid, Israeli leaders have been forced to subordinate their country’s national interests to Washington’s whims. This is bad for both allies.

Those of us who want the U.S. government to put America First, stay solvent and out of the affairs of others recognize that sovereign nation-states that resist, not enable, our imperial impulses, are the best hindrance to hegemonic overreach.

Patriots for a sane U.S. foreign policy ought to encourage all of America’s friends, especially Israel, to push back and do what’s in their national interest, not ours.

The Israeli people will be the richer without the $3 billion in aid they receive annually. As any economist worth his salt knows, foreign aid, being a government-to-government transfer, grows the public sector in the recipient country at the expense of the private, productive economy.

The Israeli people possess in abundance what economist Lord Peter Bauer called “the faculties, attitudes and institutions favorable to material progress.” Moreover, American Jews, evangelicals, and Israel’s other benefactors will continue to dwarf the U.S. State in their private, charitable contributions to the Jewish State.

President Trump is seldom at a loss for fighting words. POTUS, who won the tiff with Tlaib hands down, also provided the winning quip –

“The only real winner here is Tlaib’s grandmother. She doesn’t have to see her now!”

1 Response to Deadly Rift between Dems and Israel

At the risk of abuse, arrest or assassination, I cannot resist passing on this joke, “The USA has asked the Danes in public tweet if they ‘could sell them Greenland’, and the Danes replied in discreet privacy, ‘only after Israel sells the USA to Denmark’.”